Way Home

Product Information

Way home follows a young boy called Shane and a stray cat that Shane has decided to home. During their journey home, Shane and the cat experience many dangerous encounters such as a gang of lads and a dog. Throughout this book, Shane is always telling the cat that they are close to home so the reader is left guessing as to where Shane lives. This provides children with the opportunity to imagine where Shane lives and what it looks like. When we find out where Shane lives, it is on the streets covered with newspapers and Shane's drawings of cats. Although Shane has very little, he wants to give everything he can to make sure that the cat has everything that he needs.

PowerPoint Presentation

Have students sit in a circle with a talking piece (it could be a whiteboard marker, tennis ball, any object that is available). Only when the student has that talking piece, can they talk. Some questions for discussion to foreshadow some of the ideas in Way Home might be: As tough as his new life was, it was good for his mental health as he had none of the stresses of modern day life. He rose with the sun, and life around the small holding was dictated by the weather and the seasons. Some days there were never enough hours in the day to do all the things that he needed to do. On other days he had the luxury of time to pursue projects like a homemade hot tub. His partner, Kirsty is there as almost an afterthought in the text.He doesn’t mention whether he and his girlfriend / partner are using natural methods to control getting pregnant or she’s on the pill or whether he got the snip right after unplugging his phone and computer and before he ventured on this remote place, or she got the tubes done. It probably doesn’t matter because she isn’t living with him by the end of the book - she writes a ‘Dear John’ letter (that’s 5 years, 2 girlfriends and 1 small-holding; he doesn’t want kids). For a picture book though I would say it is rather frightening. It's a story of a boy who lives in an inner city, finds a young cat, and decides to take it home. They must travel through a gauntlet of dark and very scary incidents and places to get home. And home.... How effective is the cover in making you curious about the picture book and enticing you to read it?

Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

Also, I don’t know what the use is of cutting down trees (beech and birch) just to warm up your place (no word on how he controls wood from disease, termite) and reading paper-books, instead of ebooks because the tree loss is huge in both cases and makes his work against nature as opposed to pro-nature. Or whether he plants new trees each spring (he planted new trees in 2013 before moving in the farmhouse).

He mentions eating meat (deer) after being a lifelong vegetarian. My guess is he’d have to, to get energy for all the unforgiving work he has to do in a day. The people are the most interesting aspect of this book but there’s not enough about them. I wanted to know more about Kirsty. But not enough to finish this. A third of the way through I decided not to continue because frankly I have lots more books to read sent I’m not struggling on with this There's a radical honesty in the way Boyle presents what he's doing: he doesn't pretend to have a fully coherent, publicity-friendly philosophy that works as a manifesto for everyone; he's doing what feels right to him according to his own personal definitions and experience. I liked this very much and found it enormously refreshing, as it's like talking to a real person, who hasn't tried to perfect everything to present to the world, someone not academic in mindset, whom you wouldn't usually meet as the narrator of a creative non-fiction book. (I had thought that, in the book he might use clear definitions of types of technology, perhaps based around the 1970s appropriate tech movement, but instead he rejects the define-your-terms scholarliness for the same man-in-the-street, or man-in-the-field haphazard usage from his columns.) It feels like hearing someone from the offline, non-media world. (As it should, after he spent so much time offline to write the thing!) From one perspective, the book could have done with more editing to polish the style and reduce repetition; on the other hand, its unvarnished, home-made feel is part of the appeal.

Way Home by Libby Hathorn | Goodreads

One has the sense in reading this work that the author does find many of these things, most essentially how his life is intimately connected with the world around him, whether it is the stand of spruce nearby, or the pike he holds in his hand after catching it, that gives up its life to sustain his. He eyes his growing woodpile and food put up for the winter and realizes that these things represent his ability to live into another growing season. He explores the complexities of simplicity, and the complexities we avoid in our technologically simplified lives. There are lots of characters from different stories in the book, e.g. the big, bad wolf, the woodcutter, gigantic giant. Can you think of other books that they appear in? Besides, I would love to do a similar project if I were able. (If my health had allowed I would have gone on some kind of historical reconstruction project years ago: similar tech but less time and more costumes.) And I've given up various aspects of modern tech for a while at different times, so I've got an idea what it's like: (several of these are only really possible if spending most of your time at home, and probably living alone) Dan Jarvis is an MP and a Mayor, but this is not a book about politics. This is a book about service and family – specifically his time serving in the elite Parachute Regiment, and the tragic death of his wife Caroline. From the very start a relaxed and engaging accounting of Mark Boyle’s adventure in living for one year without technology. Mixed in with digressions of interesting personal anecdotes are Boyle’s philosophies that are based on scientific fact and not at all self-righteous or pretentious.

Books & Media

Why does he do this? He recites a number of ecological and socio-cultural reasons, but the most critical reasons are ones of existential meaning: